Religion and culture

In any discussion about religion, one must account for the fact that a religion and the culture within which it evolves are inextricably intertwined. Each shapes and is shaped by the other. So it is almost impossible to understand or discuss one without understanding and discussing the other.

More than that, it is almost impossible to fully “convert” to a religion one didn’t grow up in. One can certainly learn the theology and the rituals, but it is almost impossible to learn all the subtle cultural aspects, the unspoken attitudes and assumptions, and the many unspoken things no one even thinks to teach a newcomer because they are simply obviously “the way things are”. Converts certainly have a valid religion, but it isn’t quite the same religion as practiced and experienced by those who were raised from childhood in that religion.

What draws many people to their religion is only partly the dogmas and beliefs of that religion. The rest of the pull is to the familiar and comforting cultural aspects. It is perfectly possible to find comfort in the rituals and music and group support of a religion, and yet question or outright disbelieve that religion’s dogmas. Indeed, I suspect many people who are religiously observant are not wholly in agreement with all the beliefs they profess.

This is one of the reasons it is difficult to change cultures, or religions. It’s not possible to change the one without changing the other.

Who wants war?

In popular fiction, it is frequently generals who are advocating war, and there is some tendency in the American public to assume that the military must always be looking for an opportunity to try out its new weapons. In fact, I think that is a myth.

My reading of both recent and distant history suggests that it is usually the politicians – those who have never studied military history and know little or nothing about the real complexities of managing and supplying a battlefield army - who are most eager to find military solutions to difficult political problems. It is the generals, who have studied military history and understand the enormous uncertainties of wars and the terrible costs, who are most reticent to rush into war.

The brilliant Confederate general Robert E. Lee understood full well that the Confederacy was taking a terrible gamble to fight the northern states with their much greater manufacturing capabilities, while the Confederate political leaders were eager for a military confrontation. The equally brilliant WWII Japanese admiral Isoroko Yamamoto (who by the way attended Harvard and Annapolis, and understood Americans) was against a war with the US, and told the Japanese political leaders that with a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet he could run wild in the Pacific for perhaps six months at the most, after which the enormous productive force of the US would make things increasingly difficult for the Japanese, but his political masters didn’t believe him. And in recent history the Bush administration launched a war in Iraq against the advice of some of the senior military staff, and with far fewer troops than the experienced generals wanted, leading us to the debacle we now face.

Is it stupidity or is it arrogance that deludes politicians, most of them lawyers, into thinking they know more about warfare than the professional military people who have studied the field throughout their entire careers?

What a good manager does

My father spent his career establishing and running large research laboratories, and he taught me early on that a manager’s job is not to “manage” her/his people. A good manager’s job is to hire the best people he/she can find, and then protect them from outside interference so that they can get on with the job at hand.

Too many people reach management with the idea that a manager’s job is to sit in a big office and give orders. They use management as a way to gratify their need for power or status. I once worked in an organization (which shall remain nameless) in which everyone from the president down ate together in the same cafeteria and had offices about the same size. Some years later significant changes appeared: managers began to get bigger offices with fancier furniture, reserved parking places appeared for them, upper managers got permission to travel first class, they built a separate dining room for the managers so that they wouldn’t have to eat in the cafeteria with the rest of the staff. It is probably no surprise that within a few years the company was in deep trouble.

My principle has always been that a manager’s primary job is to run interference for his/her staff, and to do whatever tasks need to be done, no matter how “menial”, to help her/his staff get on with their jobs unimpeded. There are some other important tasks for managers – mentoring young staff is one, helping to provide a guiding vision is another, encouraging staff to improve their skills and keep up with their field is another. But the single most important task is to face outward and protect one’s staff from the inevitable inanities of the corporate bureaucracy that always exists.

Counterinsurgency strategies

Insurgencies – unofficial underground military and terrorist groups who use unconventional means of waging war, like car bombs and suicide bombers – are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. It is one of the consequences of developing an overwhelmingly powerful military force; insurgency is the only effective avenue we have left opposition groups.

The November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs contains a review essay by Colin Kahl on the new US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which was issued in its new revised form last December after considerable debate within the military establishment and its think tanks. I recommend this essay.

Looking at the history of insurgencies from the time of the Romans to the present day, only two effective counterinsurgency methods have emerged: (1) the old Roman method of brutally crushing all opposition and ruling the territory with an iron hand, and (2) the very slow process of winning the hearts and minds of the populace so that they themselves turn against the insurgency and deprive it of the indigenous support and cover that makes it possible. In general, America has tried to follow a middle path between these two, combining the worst elements of both. Not surprisingly, this has usually been not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive. In Iraq, for example, we don’t really offer the populace enough stability and safety to win them to our side, and our occasional ham-handed military sweep-and-clear operations produce enough civilian casualties and bad media exposure to help the insurgency recruit more members, yet not enough enemy casualties to really tip the balance.

The thing to remember is that insurgencies don’t have to win to succeed. They only have to produce enough pain for long enough to wear down the resolve and patience of their opponent and make them abandon the field of battle. Moreover, the modern world works in favor of insurgencies. On the one hand democracies are notoriously unable to keep a long term perspective or maintain a patient long-term policy. Voters will tolerate casualties for only so long, especially if there is no visible progress. On the other hand the worldwide media is easy to enlist and manipulate, and the emergence of the internet has simplified the propaganda, communications and organizational tasks of any insurgency.

The new US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual tries to address these issues, but however enlightened it is, the military approach will always be hobbled by the constraints and inconstancy and limited time horizons of democratic governments and their constituents, we the voters of America.

It seems to me the only solution here is to improve our skills at winning the hearts and minds of foreign populations, which is not a military task and will not be accomplished by military means, though security forces can certainly help maintain stability at times.

Spending billions producing yet more high-tech weapons systems is not likely to solve the current insurgency problem. Spending a fraction of that money on staffing our intelligence and diplomatic and aid agencies with people who really understand other countries and their languages and their cultures would pay far better dividends.

Unless, of course, the administration in power, in its arrogance, decides once again to ignore their input, as they did with Iraq.

The European Union

Our Lindblad cruise on the Danube included some outstanding lectures by one of Lindblad’s resident historians, David Barnes, who incidentally is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society (all the Lindblad staff we have met thus far are truly outstanding!). In one of his lectures he attempted to give us – all of us Americans – a European historian’s perspective on the EU. To begin with, he pointed out that recent polls show that less than a quarter of Americans are even aware that there is such a thing as the European Union, and even fewer have any idea what it is trying to accomplish.

Those Americans that are at least dimly aware of the EU tend to think of it as simply a large trading block, assembled to compete with America and therefore perhaps something of a threat to our economy. That, he argues, misses the point entirely.

To understand the political vision behind the EU, he argues, one must understand how thoroughly devastated all of Europe was by the two horrendous world wars of the 20^th century. The vision of the original founders of the EU was to knit all of Europe together so tightly – socially, economically, and politically – that there could never again be such wars among its member states. The vision is not unlike the vision the founders of the United States had, to bind the separate state into a single nation, while yet keeping the individuality of the member states. A byproduct of that effort may indeed include creation of economic and political power, but in the long run it is very much in our interests as well as Europe’s to avoid any further world wars on the European continent.

There are some in America, especially among the conservative right, who see the rise of the EU as a threat to our nation. That is probably a very short-sighted view, since a new world war on the European continent would be a much larger threat to us than any economic competition the EU might give us.

Life emulating art

I have been rereading John LeCarre’s wonderful book The Tailor of Panama. I think LeCarre has a wonderful talent for developing characters, even though many of his characters lead somewhat tortured internal lives. George Smiley, his quintessential spy character, mixes brilliance in his work with a quiet desperation in his home life. In the Tailor of Panama, a small-time British con man and ex-convict who has reinvented himself as a high-class gentlemen’s tailor in Panama is recruited (or rather blackmailed) by an ambitious British Secret Service agent into spying. Since he really knows no secrets, he is forced to invent his intelligence product, and his network of sources. As a good con man, he invents what his masters want to hear, so of course they believe him. In LeCarre’s novel, as in life, such a situation doesn’t end well.

By chance I am reading this just as the news breaks about the administration’s primary source of information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; the source upon whom they relied in launching the invasion of Iraq and embroiling us in the current tar pit there. Rafid Ahmed Alwan (codename “Curveball”) turns out to be, in essence, a small-time Iraqi con man who made up a lot of stuff to make himself more attractive to the German intelligence agencies, and to improve his chances of winning asylum in Germany. The German intelligence agencies passed along his stories to the US intelligence community, but refused to let anyone but their own German intelligence agents interview him directly. And since his stories supported what the Bush administration wanted to hear and already believed, few questioned his reliability. Those few in the intelligence community who pointed out that there was little or no corroborating evidence to support his stories were pointedly ignored, just as they are in LeCarre’s story.

Many of LeCarre’s stories are about the workings of a bumbling, incompetent, even immoral intelligence agency staffed with self-serving career bureaucrats and presided over by not-very-intelligent political masters who hold their positions by virtue of belonging to the ruling class, and because of who they know rather than what they know. One cannot but wonder how far life in the present American administration mirrors the art in LeCarre’s novels.

Prague – Oct 18

Prague is a beautiful city, home of intellectual and artistic giants like Franz Kafka and Alfonse Mucha, and beloved of Mozart. But behind the elegant beauty of Prague lie dark shadows to remind us of the fearsome intolerance of which supposedly-civilized humans are still capable. In the old Jewish quarter in the heart of present-day Prague stands the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535 and in peaceful daily use thereafter for almost 400 years, closed by the Nazis when they invaded Prague and kept closed by the Communist reign that followed the war. On its walls today are inscribed the names of almost 80,000 Prague Jews who were deported to Nazi concentration camps and never returned, some 10,000 of them children. It is a profoundly moving experience to walk through this building, reading the names and looking at the pictures that the children drew as they awaited deportation and death.

We ought never to forget that this Nazi atrocity was committed by a modern, Western, democratically elected government (yes, Hitler was lawfully elected by his constituents), operating within the legal framework in place at the time, justified by a “scientific” racial theory and a coherent official foreign policy, and with the full support of a great many people both within his nation and outside of it. If we think it can’t happen again, we are deluding ourselves. If we think it could never happen in America, we are deluding ourselves. Intolerance, irrationality, oppression and violence are endemic in human cultures, and are kept at bay only by ceaseless vigilance. We forget that lesson at our peril.

Postings will now resume

We are back from our trip and in reach of the internet again, so postings will now resume. Some of the next few posting will be based on experiences during the trip.